We are presented with a conundrum:
- Are lawmakers really this stupid?
- Are they just doing this for the camera, and they know it won’t work?
- Are we living in a Monty Python sketch?
- All of the above
Because, this is absolutely one of the weirdest things I’ve heard of, since Florida banned the words “global warming.” [the hill]
Lawmakers on Wednesday pressed F-35 maker Lockheed Martin to pay the Pentagon back millions of dollars in potentially lost labor after the firm delivered parts unable to be installed on the fighter jet.
But Greg Ulmer, Lockheed’s vice president for the F-35 program, would not commit to a figure to compensate the Defense Department for defective electronic equipment logs (EELs), saying it wasn’t entirely the company’s fault.
“It’s a complex problem. … It’s not all associated with Lockheed Martin performance. There’s many aspects relative to [parts that are] not ready for issue,” Ulmer told the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
Immediately following the meeting Ulmer excused himself, went to the bathroom, and the sound of maniacal laughter rang out. A passing intern said, “It sounded like someone was auditioning for an ‘evil dark lord’ role or something. That was some crazy witch king laughter.”
The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) has estimated that the Pentagon paid at least $183 million in labor costs since 2015 to fix the logs on more than 15,000 parts that Lockheed delivered.
Random F-35 image
Let me clarify that a bit for you, because it’s a bit hard to understand when it’s written in the original high weasel: The F-35 includes an automated parts inventory management system, which is used to track the flight time and status for each component, so maintenance can be scheduled to specification. In other words, it’s a database plus an annotation and tracking system, that updates with information downloaded from the aircraft whenever it is moved from where it’s parked. The DMCA has apparently spent at least $183mn fixing the data for 15,000 parts. That’s only $12,200 per part. I suspect that a significant amount of the problem is that the automated logistics system didn’t work right, so they test flew the planes a bunch and then someone said “now you have to back update all the component records for every plane that has been flown.” That’s actually not 100% pure compressed unreasonableness, because you don’t want to have a compressor fan with 2,000 flight hours in an engine that only has 100 flight hours and someone says “let’s fly this bad boy across the Atlantic!” Remember, it’s a plane that some genius put one engine in.
There’s a deeper problem in all of this, which is that the plane was put into limited operation while it was still under development. That has one big advantage, which is that it allows the DoDo to pretend the plane works and is ready well before when it actually is. That way, they can buy lots of them when they’re not ready – and somehow magically rationalize all changed parts back across the entire inventory. If this sounds like an incompetently run kickstarter project from hell, that’s basically what it is. Except if you’re Microsoft or Apple you can get away with telling your customers “we don’t support that version anymore, buy a new one.” Because the reality is that the DoD should not have been forking over huge buckets of money, today, for an airplane that maybe will work next week.
Remember that part about how congress is supposed to have oversight over expenditures? It would have been an ultra-edgy move, but the Lockheed Martin guy could have just said, “you’re complaining to us that you failed to do your job?”
When you’re buying a used car, you’re expected to check it out and be reasonably sure that it’s working as well as you think it does. There are even “lemon laws” in some states, in which you can recover some of your money in the event that a car radically departs from its expected performance. This is because there are car sellers that will buy a written-off car that was, say, flooded on a new car lot and sold for parts after the insurance paid for it – then they clean the car up, re-title it, and sell it as nearly new (look: 102 miles on the odometer!) in spite of the fact that the electrical system has been permanently quirked by a soak in dirty water. That’s basically the F-35: it’s a lemon and the congressional committees responsible for oversight have begun to realize that they destroyed the air force by spending all the money on a piece of junk. You know what their answer is going to be, right?
Right: We need more money
[This is just to keep me from getting so depressed I stop breathing and die at my keyboard.]
Since the money valve has been jammed in the permanent “on” position, the next move ought to be pretty darned obvious: [dn]
WASHINGTON – The Air Force has officially placed an order for its first batch of F-15EXs, awarding Boeing a contract on Monday that puts a ceiling value for the entire program close to $23 billion.
The first delivery order, which has a not-to-exceed value of about $1.2 billion, covers the first lot of eight F-15EX fighter jets, as well as support and one-time, upfront engineering costs.
The contract award is a massive win for Boeing and gives a second life for the F-15 production line in St. Louis, Mo. After years of urging the Air Force to consider an advanced version of the F-15 as a complementary capability to Lockheed Martin’s F-35, Boeing found an ally in the Defense Department’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, which in 2019 forced the service to purchase F-15EX planes in order to build capacity.
Awww the poor air force was held down in a hammer-lock by the Defense Department’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office which forced them to buy $23bn worth of aircraft to ‘supplement’ the most expensive aircraft procurement in history, which has not delivered what it was supposed to deliver.
The DoD is also playing its usual game, here. They’re building a new aircraft, and calling it a new model of an old aircraft, but it’s actually an updated ground-up design. The F-15E’s per-plane cost in 1998 was about $30mn. My amazing math powers tell me that the new ‘old’ aircraft will cost: $2.8bn. F-35s, at $100mn/plane, are cheaper. Isn’t that neat!? This is before the program experiences its inevitable planned cost overruns and the air force makes one of those “pay more, get less” deals that they are so fond of. My bet is that, since the program is not likely to be canceled, they will eventually pay $25bn for 6 aircraft instead of 8. Maybe we should set up a betting pool and see who can guess how bad it’s going to get? [OT: the navy is getting ready to pull the same shit, having an Italian ship builder build what could be called a ‘euro frigate’ to supercede the LCS, which has not managed to frigate worth a damn]
Although Air Force leaders at the time said that the service would have preferred funds to buy additional fifth generation planes like the F-35, officials now say that buying new F-15s is the quickest path for replacing aging Air National Guard F-15C/Ds that are reaching the end of their service lives.
“The F-15EX is the most affordable and immediate way to refresh the capacity and update the capabilities provided by our aging F-15C/D fleets,” Gen. Mike Holmes, Air Combat Command commander, said in a statement. “The F-15EX is ready to fight as soon as it comes off the line.”
Congress apparently has not asked “then why did we buy the F-35 in the first place?”
The contract includes options for up to 200 jets, with the Air Force projecting it will buy at least 144 F-15EX aircraft, said Air Force spokesman Capt. Jacob Bailey. Each jet is projected to have a unit flyaway cost of $87.7 million.
That ‘projected flyaway cost’ is as fictional as Harry Potter’s flying broom. Fully bulked-up it’ll probably cost $1 less than an F-35; that way they can say it’s cheaper.
What did you want, single-payer medical care? Teachers getting paid better than starvation wages? A medical agency that plans for responses to pandemics? No: you’re going to get another fast sled for delivering high explosive on anyone who disagrees with us. You want your money back!? Aaaahahahahahahahhaahahhahahahahahaahahahaahahaaaaa!!
Since I look forward to screaming “I told you so” as they throw me out of the plane, let me predict that this will open the floodgates on other services buying retro aircraft at nosebleed prices. The Navy’s going to need their own, and so are the Marines. Fucking ICE will probably need a custom combat jet, too! The ATM is spitting out bills; grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
One question that often comes up when discussing re-builds of old aircraft is, “since they already know how to make an SR-71, why don’t they just dust off the blueprints and turn the crank and make a bunch more?” That’s not a stupid question, it just doesn’t take into account that manufacturing processes have changed profoundly since then. [I have also heard this question regarding the F-1 rocket engine that powered the Saturn-V] It’s not exactly that the know-how is gone; there are still people who can TIG weld like a motherfucker, and there are plenty of machinists – but if you went to those machinists and asked them to make an F-1 engine or an SR-71, they’d say “why?” And they’d be right. If you were making an SR-71 nowadays, you’d make the skin out of carbon/carbon, and you’d basically spin it on a gigantic loom driven by a network of computers. It would be lighter, more heat resistant, have a better radar cross-section, and … um… It’d cost a bazillion dollars more. But what’s crazy is you wouldn’t be hiring a ton of TIG artists to make a beautiful sculpture in titanium, you’d be doing a couple of test-runs on a very very expensive machine and then you’d print out an SR-71. Except, call it an SR-2020. It is not, as it’s fashionable to claim in some circles, that decadent American machinists no longer know how to make a J-87 turbo-ramjet, it’s that they’re smart enough not to. They’d spend a few years simulating it first and they’d design something smaller, more powerful, and better – but what it would not be is cheaper. If you took the old blueprints for a J-87 and gave them to a bunch of machinists and said “make me 2” they’d say “look, we’d be crazy to machine that part there out of a block of titanium when we can just 3D print the tooling and do a sintered titanium version and then we could make you 4,000 for the cost of machining you 10.” That’s the point of this extended micro-rant: the economics of scale have flipped around and machinists and people who hire machinists understand that. I suppose it was Henry Ford’s big idea.
This is all over my head, but I have to wonder if they didn’t name it the F-15EX to subliminally trigger boners on the budget committees to make sure it got funded.
Ridana, I somehow didn’t notice that until you pointed that out. Maybe everyone will get 15 inch pencils, hereby dubbed PEN15, and you have to have a PEN15 if you want to make any decisions on the military.
This made me laugh a really good belly laugh. I needed that today. Thank you!
Don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Is it cheaper or not – because that sure sounds cheaper. Or is it more expensive because you’d never actually make as many as 4000 of them (so the startup costs always dominate and they’re higher)? Or because you’d use up the extra slack in manufacturing costs to make something fundamentally more than?
xohjoh2n@#4:
Don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Is it cheaper or not – because that sure sounds cheaper. Or is it more expensive because you’d never actually make as many as 4000 of them (so the startup costs always dominate and they’re higher)? Or because you’d use up the extra slack in manufacturing costs to make something fundamentally more than?
I really did not explain that well: it’s cheaper to make one, but nowadays your process is dominated by the set-up costs, so much that it doesn’t matter that making one is cheaper.
Machining a single doodad the old way is expensive: you take the blueprint (which already exists) and give it to a machinist and say “make this” Nowadays manufacturing a single doodad is pretty cheap, because you have someone spend a huge amount of time doing the CAD set-up then you 3D print it. The 3D printing is “cheap” except you need a million-dollar 3D printer and a bunch of CAD stuff. So the cost to make any individual doodad is low but the overall cost with the necessary equipment is much higher. Machine shops used to be expensive but nowadays they can be astronomical.
There are some processes where components can be manufactured independently, and the large objects can be assembled from standard parts. That’s the Henry Ford ideal. But you only get the economies of scale if all the parts are the same. Now, if you have a Rev2.3 engine that needs a fan Rev5.6a1 but it won’t work with a fan Rev5.5 or less, you can’t stock an inventory of all the fan options, so you just make the fan you need – except now you have a revision management and data management problem. It appears to me that the old way of building stuff forced engineers to get the design mostly right and then lock in on a compatible architecture. Since that’s not an issue anymore, you get fractally complex architectures.
I recall reading somewhere the the space shuttle main engines (SSME) lived right between the engineering eras I’m talking about. Each engine had parts that were very slightly fine-fitted together, so the engine was treated as a unit – you could only refurbish parts that were designed to be refurbished. Now, an engine is component-designed all the way up and you have vastly fewer parts (very good) and they’re swappable because they are made to computer tolerance and fit.
Marcus, if they decide to throw you out of the plane, insist that they use an F-35 to do the deed. That should guarantee you a long, healthy life.
I was just reading than the Russian Federation is delivering 24 Sukhoi Su-35S planes to Egypt. Perhaps the US DoD could piggyback on that order. About US$83M per plane and the production line is up and running.
@7: My understanding is that there is no waste or graft in the Russian defense industry.
But really, as cool as the vector-thrust super-maneuverable stuff is, I suspect it’s just as much as a scam as the American focus on ultra stealthy planes with perfectly integrated sensors. If we need to throw money at fancy jets so we can pretend that we might do a Great Powers War, I much prefer the delta+canard fighters that they make in Europe. The Swedish gripen is cheap (lol), and the eurofighter and the rafale even have the correct number of engines (>1)
as far as I know, ICE doesn’t have a fighter wing yet, but they do have some predator drones. They flew one over Minneapolis a few weeks ago, no doubt to honor our essential workers.
Marcus @5
Hmm, why does this remind me of software?
“”The first delivery order, which has a not-to-exceed value of about $1.2 billion, covers the first lot of eight F-15EX fighter jets, as well as support and one-time, upfront engineering costs.””
So, 150 M$ a piece. You could probably set up a miniature educational system with that, complete with scholarships, to churn out competent project planners. They can run the next procurement programme for you at a fraction of the cost and a hundredfold the returns. A penny spent is a dollar earned, to butcher a quote.
And it’s only after typing this I properly register that this is a vintage boondoggle, not the shiny new top-of-the-line boondoggle. For one of those (at final price) you could probably set up an entire guild with procurement masters, acquisition apprentices and a bunch of weird secret traditions thrown in just liven things up a little.
—
“Fucking ICE will probably need a custom combat jet, too!”
I’ve suggested it before and I’ll suggest it again: Stealth Bi- and Triplanes! The footage you could get as they’re strafing unarmed refugees at the border would be amazing. It would play really well in any Republican campaign, which might as well be the core mission statement of ICE as far as I am concerned.
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Re: Ridana (#1):
I’d just assumed they wanted to avoid – or postpone – the embarrassment of a Z version. Hard to brag with a “brand new” fighter that is the F15Z – which, while we’re at it, we could just call ‘fizz’ or ‘fizzle’ depending on how well it did.
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Re: Marcus Ranum (#5):
Don’t forget to add a massive validation, verification and testing bill on top of the other setup cost you mentioned. If you’re printing airplane parts, especially for an extreme application like a blackbird, you will need to put a lot of work into proving the part can actually work.
For example, you’d have to demonstrate that the printing process is suitable for this application and works for this particular design. Could be that the printed material, regardless of composition, won’t work in a super-stressed engine because of the way the printer puts it together. Could be that your printer can’t do the exact shapes you need, or gets them wrong, or introduces material defects, and so on.
Thanks to printing you can build much larger (or more compact), complex, single-piece components. the downside is that checking tolerances must be an absolute nightmare. Proper measurement euipment could add another stack of hefty bills to your setup cost.
And that’s just the extra V&V / testing pertaining to the printing aspect of it all. Add to that all the regular testing or certification new aircraft engines have to go through before they get anywhere near a fuselage. I believe one of those includes tossing a dead goose into your “one doodad” while it’s running, so you’d have to make at least two anyway. :)
ONE MILLION points for the gratuitous Pink Floyd reference!
My F35 is full of EELs.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Adding a bit of factual spice to the mix: it is interesting that Russia, seems a lot of things have Russia in the mix, was part of the F-35 program. Lockheed was partnered with Yakovlev to the tune of roughly $400 million. Yakovlev had previously designed a working mach 1.7 vertical takeoff fighter (Yak 141) before development funding dried up after the breakup of the USSR. Some of the F-35B design configuration looks very similar to the Yak 141.
On a related note, the US is buying the F-35s built for Turkey for less than a billion dollars. That’s good news, right? Right? *heavy sigh*
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/07/20/its-official-us-air-force-to-buy-turkish-f-35s/
@ 8 grim
My understanding is that there is no waste or graft in the Russian defense industry.
None at all.
My real point was that the production line is up and running. Much faster delivery time. Heck the US should be able to negotiate a discount because of the longer production run.
I have read a comment, that bizarrely enough (commentator’s words) there was less corruption at the higher ranks of the Russian military than in the US military.
Sadly, the Marines can’t just buy fancy F-15s. They are inextricably linked to the STOVL version of the F-35. They built an entire ship concept around it. My Marine brother used to lament the fact that they always had to do “more with less”, but with the failures of the Osprey and the F-35, he’s beginning to think that the high technology game is an endless money pit.
DrVanNostrand@#16:
Sadly, the Marines can’t just buy fancy F-15s. They are inextricably linked to the STOVL version of the F-35. They built an entire ship concept around it.
Yes, the history of marine corps aviation is complicated. It’s complicated, particularly, by organizational trauma around Guadalcanal, when they found that the air force and navy had other plans and the marines wound up surviving sustained attacks by Japanese air units – since then they have been steadfastly trying to build their own air arm, while the air force tries to block it, and the navy tries to re-absorb the marines’ and their budget.
As many military historians have pointed out, if the US military was as good at fighting the rest of the world as they are at fighting inter-service, we’d rule the world by now.